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This paper investigates how thirty-eight people who emigrated from the former Yugoslavian countries to trilingual South Tyrol represent and negotiate language power relationships in their narratives of language learning and use. Power relationships are strictly mediated through language competencies at both the community (i.e., with regard to the institutional distribution of resources) and individual levels (i.e., with regard to how individuals can get access to them) in the province of Bolzano/Bozen. As for our dataset, several participants declare having at least low competencies in both Italian and German, while a few of them also understand a local Austro-Bavarian dialect. Specifically, four types of stories are identified in the interviewees’ language biographies. These are labeled as narratives of i) exclusion, ii) assimilation, iii) empowerment, and iv) emancipation. In the first two types of stories, narrators mainly reproduce master narratives concerning newcomers’ language learning habits and outcomes in South Tyrol. By contrast, narratives of empowerment and emancipation are ‘contesting’ strategies (e.g., Fairclough 1989/2001; Pennycook 2001). However, they differ in terms of their underlying conception of power – i.e., as a property vs. as emerging from social relations – and in terms of the linguistic and textual strategies employed by tellers to convey their moral position (also: moral agency) and align their interlocutors to it.

L’âge avancé en perspective longitudinale et ses outils : LangAge, un corpus au pluriel. En marge des groupes d’âge habituellement représentés dans les échantillons sociolinguistiques, LangAge se positionne comme un recueil d’entretiens et d’enregistrements vocaux consacré à l’âge avancé de la vie. Les participantes et participants sont issues de différents milieux et appartiennent pour la plupart à la tranche d’âge des 70 ans et plus. De plus, le corpus documente jusqu’à dix ans de la vie d’une partie de ces personnes âgées. Il est ainsi possible de suivre l’évolution des mêmes individus à travers plusieurs années et d’éviter, dans la comparaison de différentes couches d’âge, les difficultés habituelles des échantillons en temps réel qui ne peuvent jamais équilibrer les particularités biographiques des individus inclus. Le sous-corpus « couples » regroupe les rencontres avec dix couples durant cette période, ce qui permet d’aborder un domaine rarement étudié. LangAge est conçu, dans l’ensemble, pour contribuer à une image linguistique plus différenciée de la génération la plus âgée. Il en résulte un corpus « au pluriel » dont la plupart des transcriptions alignées et des fichiers son sont disponibles en libre accès. L’outil LaBB-CAT est utilisé pour la publication et consultation en ligne. Nous montrerons comment sa configuration tient compte de l’architecture complexe du corpus et correspond, en même temps, aux principes FAIR tout en respectant les droits de la personne.

Oggetto del volume sono le biografie linguistiche di persone trasferitesi in Alto Adige (Südtirol) dai paesi successori alla Jugoslavia dal 1985 al 2015. Esaminando a livello contenutistico e formale i discorsi epilinguistici di parlanti che hanno vissuto e vivono in spazi sociolinguistici altamente complessi, la ricerca si propone di contribuire allo studio della ristrutturazione dei repertori in situazioni di contatto. Due sono le unità di analisi specifiche, identificate tramite i metodi della sociolinguistica interpretativa. Da un lato, si analizzano i glottonimi e le apposizioni usate per riferirsi alle varietà linguistiche d’origine. Ne emerge un quadro dei modi di posizionarsi dei partecipanti nei confronti dei recenti interventi di pianificazione linguistica in area balcanica. Dall’altro, si ricostruiscono gli spazi comunicativi narrati di tre intervistate attraverso l’esame delle loro storie di dialoghi. Questi racconti mostrano come le narratrici, attingendo a schemi interpretativi circolanti nella società altoatesina o resistendo loro, diano un senso vis-à-vis con la ricercatrice al cristallizzarsi di nessi più o meno inamovibili tra codici, luoghi e interlocutori nella regione d’arrivo.

This article examines the functional category of domain adverbials (DAs), which arose fairly recently in the European languages and is claimed to occur frequently in the written press. In order to better understand this category, we investigate the form, use and meaning of DAs in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish and highlight important intra- and cross-linguistic differences by means of a qualitative and quantitative empirical study based on a corpus of journalistic texts drawn from online daily newspapers. Our results show that cross-linguistically DAs are mainly realized as adverbs formed through a standard word-formation rule. Our results also point to important cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and types of domain adverbs used in the five languages. We explain these differences by taking into account grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse-related parameters.

This study compares the productivity of word formation patterns involving the affixes -ung, -keit/-igkeit/-heit, -bar and ver-. The comparison is between non-native and native German writers, using the Chamisso corpus and a comparable corpus. The creative use of the German language in non-native literature, a literature of migrant authors who write in German as a foreign language, is widely considered the most prominent feature of this writing. According to critics, this creative use of language is related to the fact that authors switch from the native language to German. Such an assumption is plausible from a linguistic standpoint: empirical studies in language acquisition and in sociolinguistics support the hypothesis that linguistic creativity could consist of an over-use of productive morphological categories. My results reject the hypothesis that the non-native authors differ from German authors in the productivity of the observed morphological categories. This negative result points out that the non-native authors have achieved near-native competence in the use of word formation patterns.